International Conflict over Water Resources in Himalayan Asia

R. Wirsing,C. Jasparro,D. Stoll

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137292193
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The authors explore the fresh water crisis of Himalayan Asia. While the region hosts some of the world's mightiest rivers, it is also home to rapidly modernizing, increasingly affluent, and demographically multiplying societies, ensuring the rapid depletion of water resources and of disputes over ownership of transboundary waters.

Part I

Fundamentals of River Rivalry in Himalayan Asia

1

Water Insecurity in Himalayan Asia

The crisis over freshwater resources

Scientists and policy makers are fast approaching unanimity that a fresh-water crisis is in progress the world over. Both the severity of this crisis and its content vary widely among the world’s regions, sub-regions, and countries, and there is intense debate over its causes and reversibility. No longer much debated, however, is whether the crisis exists. On the contrary, its huge scale, potentially calamitous consequences, and imminent dangers to the political stability and security of the planet’s many water-crisis-afflicted nations are now commonplace topics both in scholarly literature and in global public discourse.¹

There is not much debate over the severity of water resource problems in Himalayan Asia, a vast and variously defined area which, for this book’s purposes, embraces the six mainland members of the eight-nation South Asian region, a grouping of states formally joined together in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC),^* the five mainland members of the ten-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),^† and China. While this region possesses abundant river resources, including some of the world’s mightiest rivers,^‡ its hosting of rapidly modernizing, increasingly affluent, and demographically multiplying societies at the same time ensures the emergence of constant resource challenges, including worrisomely low freshwater availability per capita rankings.^§ What remains eminently debatable – and is the focus of this book – is the impact of this crisis on the Himalayan Asian region’s present and future interstate relations.

This is hardly a trivial question. Of the world’s nine known nuclear weapon states, Himalayan Asia houses three – China, India, and Pakistan. It also houses four of the ten largest armies on earth (China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam). Five of the 12 states located in Himalayan Asia (China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Cambodia) have fought wars with one another since World War II – in the case of India and Pakistan, three or more times. Two of the 12 (China and India) are nowadays spoken of as Great Powers. One of them (China) now lays claim to being the world’s second largest economy, and it is only a matter of time, at least in the judgment of some observers, before it boasts the power to match, if not replace, America as ruler of the world.² It goes without saying, in other words, that whatever trajectory Himalayan Asia’s freshwater crisis takes in the future, it is unlikely to leave untouched the future economic, political, and strategic trajectories of the dozen Himalayan Asian countries included in this study. And that, it seems clear, is a weighty matter for the entire world.

The central issue of this book, then, is how the Himalayan Asian region’s freshwater crisis impacts the interstate relations of the region. This naturally leads us to question at the discussion’s outset whether transboundary rivers are a significant feature of Himalayan Asia – significant enough, in other words, for us to be seriously concerned about how their presence impacts the Himalayan Asian region’s present and future interstate relations. The Register of International Rivers, a compilation of the now-defunct United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, lists a total of 214 international waterways whose basins or watersheds cover about 47 percent of the planet’s continental land surface.³ Last updated in 1978, the Register has fallen far behind the numerous modifications made since then in national territorial boundaries impacting these waterways. A careful update in 1999 done under the auspices of the Committee for International Collaboration of the International Water Resources Association, in association with Oregon State University’s Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project (TFDDP), lifted the total number of international waterways to 261, covering about 45.3 percent of the land surface of the earth.⁴ This number was adjusted in 2001 to 263. Drawing upon the 1999 update, we note that Asia has 53 (20 percent) of the world’s international river basins and some 39 percent of the Asian land mass lies within these basins. Subsequent updates have slightly changed the figures: according to a 2002 TFDDP listing, the number of international river basins in Asia had risen to 57. In that year, the 12 nations of Himalayan Asia shared 33 (58 percent) of these international river basins.⁵

Obvious from these figures is the fact that transboundary rivers are a common feature of Asia in general and of Himalayan Asia in particular. Far more important than the raw figures, however, is the question of the significance that this feature holds for the international relations of Himalayan Asia’s riparian states. In particular, what does the record of inter-riparian relations pertaining to Himalayan Asia’s river systems tell us about the role freshwater resources play in motivating conflictive or cooperative state behavior? Have these resources generated more agreement than disagreement? Is there anything in their record that speaks convincingly of future water wars? In view of the argument of this book, spelled out later in this chapter, it will come as no surprise that this question stands at the heart of an intense and sustained controversy.

Himalayan Asia: Geographic scope of the study

This book, as observed above, focuses on the hydro-political circumstances of 12 countries – at least parts of which lie in Himalayan Asia. As is true of virtually any commonly employed regional designation, the authors’ definition of Himalayan Asia is arbitrary, chosen not because its boundaries are unambiguous and uncontested, but because the geographic scope of these boundaries admirably suits the authors’ purpose: to conduct an examination of selected cases of international rivalry over transboundary freshwater resources. So, exactly what is to be included in a definition of Himalayan Asia? Occupying the middle space of this region and giving it its name is the Himalayan Range – literally the “abode of snow”. This range occupies the center of a vast and interlocking set of mountain ranges forming a huge arc-like feature dominating the landscape and cradling inner Asia. What is conventionally spoken of as the Great Himalayan Range consists of three parallel ranges – the Greater Himalayas, the Lesser Himalayas, and the Outer Himalayas – running west to east roughly 2,500 kilometers (1,700 miles) from Kashmir to Assam and in width anywhere from 100 to 400 kilometers (about 62–249 miles). The most renowned of the three ranges, the Greater Himalayas, holds the world’s three highest peaks, all over 8,000 meters – Mount Everest, K2, and Kangchenjunga. As can be seen in the map below of the Himalayan System–Tibetan Plateau Region (Map 1.1), the definition of Himalayan Asia can arguably reach much further: northwestwards to include the geophysically connected Tien Shan, Kunlun, Hindu Kush, Pamir, and Karakoram mountain ranges; northeastwards to include the Naga and Mizo Hills on the borders of Indian Assam and northernmost Myanmar; northwards from the valley of the YarlungTsangpo (in India, the Brahmaputra)River to include what is sometimes called the Trans-Himalayas – the vast Qinghai–Xizang (Tibetan) Plateau; and southwards and southeastwards to embrace the far-reaching catchment areas of the rivers originating in the Himalayas and Trans-Himalayan Tibetan Plateau.

Map 1.1 Major Rivers of Himalayan Asia

This book focuses on the transboundary river systems that originate in Himalayan Asia, on their basins or catchment areas, and on the interstate rivalry that exists over the immense freshwater resources of these basins. As pointed out earlier, it focuses on particular river systems – those feeding into the mainland countries of South and South East Asia plus China. Best suited for the purposes of this book, therefore, is a definition of Himalayan Asia that embraces the Himalayan System starting from the Karakoram Mountains in the west, where India, Pakistan, and China meet, and stretching eastwards to China’s Hengduan Mountains, located in the southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau and forming the boundary between China and Myanmar; reaching northwards to include the Tibetan Plateau and the headwaters of the rivers feeding into South and South East Asia; and extending southwards and southeastwards to include the alluvial plains watered by the Himalayan Asian rivers.

This definition of the geographic scope of the book thus does not include all 17 of the countries embraced by a broadly defined Himalayan System. Specifically, it excludes entirely from examination the five Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, portions of which lie in the catchment areas of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, both of which originate in the Himalayan System, and both of which undeniably entail much water-resource rivalry of their own.

This definition should not be understood to imply, either, that equal treatment will be given to all the many rivers having their headwaters in the Himalayan–Tibetan Plateau region. Of the ten largest rivers or river systems with their headwaters in this region (see Table 1.1), the authors’ examination of interstate water-resource conflict will focus primarily on four – the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Mekong – all of them importantly transboundary in character, all of them involving major powers, and the waters of all of them today fiercely contested. Dwelling in the basins of these four river systems and heavily dependent on the water resources they provide is a huge fraction of Asia’s population. As will be seen, these resources have given birth to an array of hydro-political problems that increasingly dominate the region’s political landscape. Indeed, arising from the clashing interests of the riparian states in the water resources of these four river systems are some of the most tortuously complicated and potentially explosive political dilemmas of the contemporary era.

Table 1.1 Major Rivers of the Greater Himalayas–Tibetan Plateau Region^*

^* River measurements are inevitably arbitrary, since river beginnings can be variously defined.

Source: River lengths are drawn from the Encyclopedia Britannica, “World’s longest rivers and river systems”, http://www.britannica.com.

The argument

The argument of this book is that Himalayan Asia as a whole is in the midst of an acute freshwater crisis, that this crisis is surfacing in a myriad of ways and with varying intensity in all the countries of this region, and that the cumulative effects of this crisis are recasting the region’s interstate relations increasingly in terms of water-resource rivalry – a development that threatens both to widen the region’s existing geopolitical cleavages as well as to stall its already snail-paced progress toward greater regional cooperation. This development is apparent in the bilateral relations of the South Asian region’s major co-riparian states (India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), both in how they define their national interests and in how they set both their domestic and foreign policy priorities, and it is also of growing importance in the bilateral relations of mainland South East Asian countries. It is of rapidly mounting prominence, as well, in the relations of both the South and South East Asian regions with their northern neighbor China. Increasingly, the decision-makers in all 12 Himalayan Asian states featured in this book are manifesting keen awareness that their countries’ shares of transboundary freshwater resources – and overall water security – are far from assured and that their capacity to hold onto and successfully manage these renewable but far from limitless resources is going to play a determinative role in shaping their countries’ future prospects. The result is that something akin to a zero-sum mentality threatens to intrude more and more upon their water policy calculations.

The region’s mounting water-resource conflict owes its scale and intensity in important measure to the region’s arguably unique river resource circumstances. These include, of course, the rivers’ immense transboundary dimensions. But they also include regional circumstances – stark political and economic asymmetries, for example, as well as powerful strategic overtones and deeply conflictive geopolitical histories. Even without conflict over water resources, in other words, the region...